climate transition, public policy, etc. at @Harvard argumentative citizen, hence arguing.

Delhi - Boston
Joined October 2020
A more optimistic account (as conscience demanded), with Bayesian updating. And a little commentary on my favorite bird. Also appreciating the shape of the beast that is hope in Indian democracy bhatotia.substack.com/p/we-a…
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“I am a math professor, and my field is in crisis,” @stevenstrogatz writes of the introduction of AI into mathematics. He argues that his field is as much an expression of the human spirit as music and literature: theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1…
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Global call-centre employment is contracting
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No words. The @MoEFCC’s empowered committee has recommended dumping 650 million litres per day of treated industrial wastewater from Surat’s chemical and textile hub into the #GulfOfKhambhat—a highly sensitive, biodiverse #estuarine ecosystem home to #mangroves, mudskippers & and migratory shorebirds. The irony of the #environment ministry sanctioning deep-sea dumping that threatens marine life and local fisherfolk livelihoods. #SaveGulfOfKhambhat #MarineEcology #Gujarat
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Rent extraction 🥀
in london a nice dinner with 2 drinks used to be like 50 pounds. now in delhi if you go somewhere decent and have 2 drinks with dinner, you’re easily spending 4-5k per person when did india get this expensive?? i’m literally spending what i spent in london for lunches and dinners
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This is significant. While the world looks away, this disaster seems to be unfolding by stealth, with potential consequences for the world.
Contact tracing can be porous (could you remember everyone you were around even in passing for the past 3 weeks?) If contacts & chains become uncertain, rapid testing of anyone with symptoms in potentially affected areas can catch hidden spread before it becomes wider & harder to rein back in
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The Rajamannar Committee recommend the abolition of the All India Services (IAS, IPS, and IFS).
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.@AiyarYamini in @nytimes: "Many Indians, including myself, do not possess the mass of paperwork that is needed. A minor difference in the spelling of a person’s name across their documents can knock them off the rolls. The courts offer little recourse" nytimes.com/2026/10/20/opini…
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How flattering would it be if all that your well wishers can come up about you is “he could’ve been worse”
"Serious economist" is a bit like "serious astrologer". Sanjeev was a typical top Indian intnl banker - instead of fading away in comfortable luxury of SG, he decided to engage in the rough and tumble of Indian govt. He is doing his bit as he believes.
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Mr Sanyal, weren't you a Visiting Fellow at IDFC Institute? IDFC Foundation received a $390,000 grant from the Ford Foundation.
His work was funded by Ford Foundation and McArthur Foundation. How many million years would it take to those "100 workers" to match billionaires like Henry Ford and John McArthur? Or is this calculation meant only for the non-white billionaires? Saving Indian souls - backed by western business - is a very old game.....
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The point about creating high productivity jobs is well taken, but there is still a lot of ignorance in this post. MGNREGA was never supposed to be the bulwark of employment generation; it was supposed to be a fallback option. It will take a long and honest discussion to understand the pros and cons of the scheme. For now, here are some keywords that one can think of when assessing the effects of a scheme like MGNREGA: "revealed preferences", "opportunity cost", "general equilibrium". In case one is still interested, read the abstract of this research paper: econometricsociety.org/publi…
Drèze admirers larp a lot about MGNREGA. That tells you everything. If a two decade intellectual legacy rests on a scheme that paid people to dig gaddha one season and refill them the next, the legacy is weaker than its fans imagine. MGNREGA was never a development programme. It was a consumption subsidy stupidly dressed as work. It created payrolls and negligible productivity. Its assets were notoriously flimsy, its leakages chronic and its own statutory promise of 100 days was never realised. Worse, it taught an entire rural generation that the state's highest aspiration for them was manual labour at subsistence wages. Contrast China. Beijing moved its rural surplus labour into township enterprises, factories, ports and export corridors. They built capability that compounded without some jholachaap economist. We spent two decades paying for activity instead of building capacity, and called it a rights revolution. Thankfully, parliament has now repealed the Act. Our poor never needed a perpetual shovel. We need to provide them more factory gates.
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2026 Amartya Sen Lecture with Prof Thomas Piketty November 4 @ 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm UTC+0 Paris /Online - register at link. “Global Justice Report: The Plan for Equality and Prosperity within Planetary Boundaries” . hd-ca.org/es/event/2026-amar…
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Fails to mention (extremely Bad thing as a researcher): 90% labour force informally employed; and no good evidence that labour law is the actual impediment in the journey towards formality which seems to have stopped in its path.
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Apt time to share this econ working paper, which costed the author his job, finding electoral manipulation in closely contested constituencies in 2019 general elections in India. The mechanism resembles what’s unfolding now on massive scale, as Vote Chori” papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…
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Please be critical of these oversimplifications. He’s right in pointing that the judicial overburden is neglected in our political economy but the world doesn’t work in the vignettes he draws for us. For one, he hasn’t been to India.
I genuinely despise Indian politics. The fundamental political issues are not things like "should we raise or lower taxes?" or "how shall we encourage manufacturing?", it's literally all "does my caste or your caste get the government jobs?". It's all so futile.
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My interview with Yogendra Yadav: newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/i…
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Civil litigation is something of a black box in terms of data analysis - we know so little about how many civil cases there are and around what, as compared to the criminal side. Our work using e-courts data attempts to bring numbers to the table.
The full extent of people's interactions with the law in India can be difficult to quantify. We analysed cases disposed of across India’s subordinate courts between 2010 and 2020. These cases, heard before magistrates, civil judges, and district and sessions judges, are the first point of contact between Indians and the legal system. In all, this dataset contains 43 million records of legislation invoked in cases. While criminal cases contribute to the majority of the dataset, the data also provides valuable insights into civil litigation, which is otherwise rarely captured in Indian data. Civil statutes define people’s rights and obligations in personal or contractual relationships, and provide remedies when disputes arise. The top five civil statutes invoked in the ten-year period were the civil provisions of the Motor Vehicles Act of 1988, the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955, the Registration of Births and Deaths Act of 1969, the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act of 2005, and the Arbitration and Conciliation Act of 1996. The civil provisions of the Motor Vehicles Act are the most commonly invoked, with 1.75 million records. They cover claims over loss of life or property, vehicle damage and insurance liability. Section 166, which allows people to seek compensation after an accident, was cited 1.25 million times. The Hindu Marriage Act follows with 1.34 million records. It covers marriage, divorce and separation among Hindus, with contested divorce cited most often, followed by divorce by mutual consent. #CriminalLaw #Legal #Law #India #DataForIndia
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Heron by by Spencer and Sabra Field woodcut
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